Each Experience Speaks Its Own Language

“Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing” is the most exciting exhibition of drawings the Museum of Modern Art has produced in years. Organized by Connie Butler, the museum’s chief curator of drawings, it presents a delightfully unpredictable mix of about 100 works by two distinct groups: self-taught outsider artists and idiosyncratic but conventionally trained professionals, many of whom have been inspired by outsider art.

The show does not distinguish between the two in either the labeling or the arrangement. Outsiders like Henry Darger, James Castle and Bill Traylor are interspersed among insiders like Louise Bourgeois, H. C. Westerman and Jim Shaw.

What links all the artists is the drive to work primarily from internal, private sources of inspiration. The word glossolalia, which means speaking in tongues, makes this point succinctly. It suggests that each artist, rather than adopting a familiar, academically certified style has created a unique language with which to express his or her own experience.

Unlike real glossolalia, which is typically incomprehensible, most of the drawings Ms. Butler has selected (all from the museum’s permanent collection) are intelligibly representational. Still, there is a more or less obscurely personal dimension in most pieces. Often you have the feeling of seeing just the tip of a psychic iceberg. It’s the opposite of Frank Stella, who famously said of his works, “What you see is what you see.”

Photo

Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art features a range of
works, including Plan for World Trade Monopoly by Oyvind Fahlstrom.Credit
Museum of Modern Art and Öyvind Fahlström

Take for example a small cityscape drawn with exacting pencil lines by an unidentified European psychiatric patient in 1901. This bird’s-eye view of a cobbled street, zooming in one-point perspective to the center of a crystalline complex of carefully detailed Victorian buildings, is unaccountably eerie. You don’t know what it means but you sense that, like a dream, it symbolizes something urgently significant for the artist, whether he or she knew it or not.

Notwithstanding the democratic hanging, you may find yourself pondering the differences between insiders and outsiders. Most outsiders operate within closed systems. Their works tend to be narrowly focused and give off an autistic vibe.

Unlike insiders, outsiders seem not to worry too much about how their creations will appear to others, which is why they can appear so astoundingly original. The self-taught artists Joseph Yoakum, who made swirling, Art-Nouveauish landscapes, and Bill Traylor, who painted and drew jaunty silhouettes of people and animals in lively, radically simplified scenes, were both wonderful, naturally gifted draftsmen. But neither had the ability to develop or to break out of one fixed way of working or to integrate influences. This is true also of Pearl Blauvelt and James Castle, each of whom made haunting, intensively worked drawings — as well as sculptures, in Castle’s case — based on their insular domestic worlds.

Another striking example is a Uruguayan artist named Gustavo Lazarini Terradas, whose 1941 watercolor portrait of an elderly woman with dark skin and strangely penetrating eyes is so realistic that it’s almost scary.

The outsider Henry Darger, represented here by one of his luminous, panoramic watercolor landscapes populated by half-naked little girls, is an exception that proves the rule. He was a reclusive, possibly deviant eccentric, but as an artist he was amazingly resourceful in his uses of art materials and imagery from lifted from books and magazines.

But most outsider art lacks the kind of virtuosity and stylistic complexity evident in the drawings of Jim Nutt, a Chicago artist who has been decisively influenced by outsider and folk art. His mysterious portraits of imaginary women drawn with graceful, razor-sharp pencil lines look like collaborations among Ingres, Picasso and the American folk artist Ammi Phillips. Two funny, early works by Mr. Nutt about sexual anxiety, one from the 1960s and one from the ’70s, are also not to be missed.

There are artists in the show whose relationship to the insider-outsider dialogue that Ms. Butler has set up may be less obvious. Jean-Michel Basquiat was certainly no outsider. His vigorous, chartlike compositions of hieroglyphic signs and word lists are products of a dandyish, semiotic gamesmanship. In this context, however, his drawings resemble works by an inspired, possibly crazy street artist.

A 1942 pencil drawing by Gray Foy, a little-known American artist born in 1923, is a curious feat of craftsmanship. It is a scrambled, congested, Dali-like composition of body parts, still-life, architecture and landscape made with unbelievable refinement and microscopic detailing. Informed by Cubism, Surrealism and Magic Realism, it is clearly not the work of a naïf. But its technical extremism — he spent several years working on it — places it beyond the pale of mainstream art making.

An outsiderish side is seen too in Raymond Pettibon, whose noirish cartoons captioned with portentous literary quotes suggest the efforts of a beatnik autodidact. And diagrammatic abstractions by the sophisticated, mid-20th-century Modernist Alfred Jensen look like a nutty folk artist’s esoteric researches into systems of time and space.

Richard Prince is a more dubious case. His mixed-media work involving an odd, finely drawn head, hand-written jokes and a scribbled grocery list may resemble some kind of crackpot graffiti. But knowing Mr. Prince’s slick recyclings of mass-media imagery and acerbic satires of lower-middle-class American culture, it is a stretch to find any authentic personal inwardness in it.

Even the more questionable inclusions, however, serve to enrich an exhibition, which, by defying the usual hierarchies and cutting across standard academic categories, refreshes our relationship to the imperishable art of drawing.

“Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing” continues through July 7 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page E25 of the New York edition with the headline: Each Experience Speaks Its Own Language. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe